“Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a key enabler of software-driven innovation – facilitating rapid iteration and developer agility. It comprises a set of tools, libraries and services for deploying, managing and scaling applications in the cloud. Adopting an enterprise-grade, multi-cloud PaaS solution frees developers to create game-changing web and mobile applications. It also allows these applications to scale across cloud environments, based on the business need.”

Organizations such as Netflix and Nike aren’t just pioneering new business models, they are also new pioneering new technologies that accelerate these models, new Cloud hosting and software design methods like ‘Microservices’ and Continuous Deployment.

The Cloud is not only changing how software is hosted and executed, it’s also changing how it is written and maintained as well as how it is architected and developed, achieved through DevOps practices and Microservices design patterns.

PaaS & Microservices

These are practices you can repeat on other Cloud platforms, like Cloud Foundry, a technology that enterprises like JP Morgan are adopting for their Enterprise PaaS strategy.

“Many of the products or systems being build with microservices are being built by teams with extensive experience of Continuous Delivery and it’s precursor, Continuous Integration. Teams building software this way make extensive use of infrastructure automation techniques. This is illustrated in the build pipeline shown below.”

In this blog Uri Cohen of their product team describes how some microservice scenarios will feature more complexity, in terms of also provisioning stateful applications and supporting components that aren’t microservices, such as a central data repository.

Uri explains Cloudify is a platform that can automate the provisioning of this increased complexity through the use of TOSCA open standards.

Apprenda introduce the Enterprise PaaS concept in an early white paper – Private PaaS explaining how it is introduced into the enterprise environment,

In this blog, CEO Sinclair Schuller says of the relationship between Enterprise PaaS and Microservices:

“Essentially, the smarts should be in the app components, and the communication between those components must be as simple as possible. Without that requirement, architectures will bloat and become monolithic. When asked, “How does your PaaS support microservices?” most enterprise PaaS vendors offer little more than deployment agility. While agility is an important piece of the puzzle, application bootstrap policies directly support both the smart-endpoints / dumb-pipes visionand the implementation of microservices.”